Atlas (Harry Styles)
by noisysunday
Summary: This is the story about Harry and how happens upon Alice, the flamboyant lady with a prideful intellect and constant need for adventure. Things happen. Enjoy this tale that consists of unforeseeable dragon encounters, one million dollar ukuleles, happy Christmases, and the fact that everything can be solved with a cup of tea.


_OCTOBER_

She was peeling an orange by the cafe when Harry tripped over her foot.

The newspaper he'd been reading fell from his fingers, the cursive title playing on the top now partially wet from the snow bank below. He swallowed, curling his fingers into his palm.

"Oh! Love, I'm sorry," she said, half panting, half laughing, her hand covering the right side of her face. Her eyes roamed a small, spacious area, holding her other hand out a bit. "Are you alright?"

Harry studied her soft jaw, his heart bumping into his ribs as he nodded. The lady's face morphed and her clouded over pupils narrowed, moving forward by the inches as her hand reached out a bit more.

"Hey, pal? Have you got selective mutism, there?" she asked him, and Harry's eyes widened as if to say, _get a grip, okay_—

—_she's blind, okay._

As he plans his sudden mediocre apology, he shakes his head once again, making sure to lightly take a hold of her hand, spotting the dog next to her. "Sorry," he breathed, coming out from behind the snow bank with his black shoes freshly ruined. "'S my fault. Hope your orange is still intact, and all."

The lady muffled a small laugh. Her hand, well, felt clammy and soft and small—small and fitting. "It is," she promised, setting the orange down and reaching towards his face, feeling his cheek first, his jaw slightly after, examining nothing in particular.

"Hi," she whispered.

"Hi," he said back.

And, it was the blatant fact that being strangers never crossed his mind, because her hands felt good against his cheeks despite the never to be shunned away cold, brisk wind.

"You've got a name," she told him. "I'd quite like to know what it is."

"Harry," he said. She shifted her weight to the opposite leg, and Harry noticed how she still smelled of an orange. If he looked—she seemed familiar, but if for any reason it seemed to be the slightest amount true, it was too long ago to replenish the memory in his brain of whom she reminded him of.

"Harry," she mused. The steam from the restaurants lining the streets leaked from the roofs, making the earth a little muggy and the setting sun look like honey pouring down the horizon, coating the trees and roads. Harry mentally withered away at the seams when her hand grasped the back of his neck, right at the nape and rubbed with her thumb. "Your—your hair. Is it as colossal as I'm imagining it to be?"

"A bit more," he said, words mumbled from her fingers over his lips.

"I'm not really into this, touchin' people's faces, and all," she murmured, her voice smudged with something similiar to sleep and thoughts. "But, I like your face. 'S kinda soft."

The words that were ready to roll off of Harry's tongue were put to a halt as the lady dropped her hands to her side, exhaling as if it were her last chance to do such a thing.

Harry was dreaming—surely dreaming that, even in a crowd of beings busily pushing past him, the one in front of him was simply somehow existing above all of them, shining like that honey sun that was still there, slowly falling down below the hills.

She had small feet, too, matched her small hands. She was small.

"It was nice to meet someone new," she said, her voice light in the midst of the spacious rush around them. "But I'm surely not the only flower in your garden. I'll let you get back to your priorities."

_I'm only a wise pen salesman_, Harry thought. _I haven't any real priorities._

"Okay," he said instead, because, well; it was the best he could do.

"Okay," she repeated him, nodding a bit to herself as she nudged the dog next to her right side, who'd been contently watching the people protrude from the restaurant doors with food in their arms. "Harry, well—you have a nice evening."

Harry stood, mentally gathering himself together as he watched the lady give a small hand gesture that consisted of a short but meaningful goodbye. But then she was walking away to have the pieces falling from the bun loosely tied at the back of her head land in her maroon scarf, and the thing was, he didn't think he gathered himself quite completely.

Indeed, he'd be nothing short of stupid if he thought tripping over the lady's foot with the scent of oranges in the air hadn't been the start of everything.

But she still had yet to disappear behind the buildings, and Harry watched her, thinking that the yellow shirt under her denim jacket was brighter than a tulip itself. Then, well—she could be the only flower in his garden, maybe. A bright yellow one, one that couldn't even see the sun above her, but could feel it all the same.

_NOVEMBER_

Her name was Alice.

At least, if it wasn't false advertising when it came to business name tags.

Harry stood outside of the 801 Grand building whilst at the newspaper stand, watching her bite into an apple. She was there every morning, her dog's head on her knees, her fingers peeling away at some type of fruit.

And every morning, Harry flicked and filed through the newspapers, and thought he she was the sun for a few seconds.

Her clothing wrinkled when pressed to the orange bricks, the late autumn sun shining only top strands of hair on her hair. She even smiles at her fruit, which he brightens—no, he beams in the center of the group of seniors heading for the morning brunch, and drops the newspapers on the wooden stand in front of him.

The journey to her was a treacherous one, considering he'd nearly fell over the first couple of stairs, but that was okay, because she was just as sunny up close.

"Alice," he said for the first time, the plump dog next to her licking his palm, as if it'd be just their secret.

She looked in the way of the sound, her eyebrows stitching together. She hummed a bit with curiosity, as if relishing the sound, and a smile fully grazed it's way to the corner of her lips. "Why, I haven't heard from you in a bit."

He knew. "I know."

"Can't blame you for being a busy man, I think," she said. She stepped off of the bricks, brushing off her clothing. "It's quite sunny today, don't you reckon? I can feel it everywhere."

"Reckon it is," Harry told her. "They even opened up the apple orchard."

"Down on Abbey?"

"On Abbey," Harry confirmed.

She smiled, fond of the thought, "You're going, right? Thinkin' a man like you would be up for picking apples in autumn."

He rubbed the back of his neck. "The lads and I were actually going tonight."

Alice's brows arched, murmuring slowly, "There's more of you?"

"Five of us," Harry said, though it seemed to be the newest thing ever to tell someone. He wanted to laugh in spite of himself.

"Well," she said, taking a bite of her banana, "I'd love to be the sixth wheel."

**x**

Alice was the best sixth wheel in Harry's life.

By the gold yellow sun of Abbey Apple Orchard, everything smells like apples and cinnamon, just because Alice smells like cinnamon.

She's sweet like that, he thought.

"You know," Alice told him at the orchard, the other lads wandering aimlessly with no sole purpose of purchasing those overly priced apples over there, and Harry stood next to her, handing her slices of one he picked for her. "This one song I know, I think you'd like it."

She started humming the song, then, before Harry could say anything. That was okay, though. He liked music, and he hadn't the slightest clue as to what this song was, but he just liked how Alice paused the humming to take a bite of her apple slice, then continued on through the notes.

The only time she stopped humming for good was when she laughed after leaving the small apple market addition to the orchard, after Niall had whispered something in her ear about how to find your way out after getting proper lost in a corn maze, or something.

But then Niall begun to nudge them in the direction of the so called corn maze, and Harry had no choice but to follow, because his idiodicy was nothing but spectacular when it came to Alice and quiet places.

_("How are you with mazes, Harry?" Alice asked him in the apple smelling atmosphere of the newly founded night, and Harry could've guessed an ecstatic tone in her voice.)_

_"Ace," he lied.)_

But the corn maze itself is itchy, pokey and scares Harry half to death when the sunset turns into a darker option for the sky.

"Don't underestimate how lost I'm about to become," Alice mumbled, her hand bumping his. It was a delightful moment.

"I'll be all the same kind of lost," he admitted, "but bad things don't lurk in your common corn maze, I reckon."

"Only sometimes," she said, an attempt at sounding beautiful and dark combining perfectly to make Harry's heart ache.

It only took ten minutes and twenty-nine seconds for Theo to lose the group, and for Zayn and Liam to sneak off, and for Louis to nudge Harry and Alice together _(which was an awfully predictable moment for the lad)_, and for Harry and Alice to wind up upon a dead end—a dead end with a scarecrow, which he might peacefully add.

"I've come to the conclusion that it's just us now," Alice whispered, pressing her hand to her slightly damp forehead, hair matted down to it a bit. "Unless your mates are at a quiet state all of a sudden."

_That would be the marvelous day_, Harry thought.

As he watched her bump into the scarecrow with a breathy laugh, her pale eyes widening, he considers surging forward and kissing her mouth, just to drag his lips over her own would send his heart away.

Instead, he said, "Just us."

"Bullocks," she murmured, wetting her lips. "A blind woman and a man who isn't too fond of corn fields. Or mazes. Have you come to reckon we might be doomed?"

Harry thought about this sentence, in particular. It wasn't something that was clearly a bad thing in the universe, being stuck with Alice in an itchy, spacious area of nothingness, but he just liked looking at her, so it was alright if he didn't get out.

Then, Alice plopped down, pulling her sundress over her bum beforehand and smoothing out the rest as she sat atop the dirt of the ground. She looked in Harry's direction, expectant of all things.

He shrugged to himself, invisible to her as if in a darkened forest before carefully sitting next to her, dirt printing his pants. She felt his forearm, just to make sure he was real and there.

"Harry," she whispered, "what things do you like in the world?"

Harry shifted, her hand moving down to his thigh unexpectedly. He didn't move it. "Well," he started slow, "I'll give you a list, Alice."

"I'm ready for your list," she said, fingers curling.

"Forrest Gump," he continued on, sniffling. "Frank Sinatra. Tea with one sugar, nice people, warm things and the autumn. Fruit slices. Old films."

"Fruit slices," Alice repeated, but not chuckling. "I've got a list, too."

"Tell it to me," said Harry.

"Books with maps. I like when people tell me about them, and I sometimes like how the sun shines in my house and warms me up and melts all the snow in the winter. Drag races. Islands. But not dolphins, Harry, I don't like dolphins."

"That's okay," he promised her, even though he wasn't. Alice shifted, this time, until her leg touched his, the moon prominent in the sky. She nudged his thumb and took a breath.

"You know, you don't talk often. But I like your voice and I'd quite like to keep you around for the rest of my life," she murmured to him, and Harry's heart was no longer after that. A dead beat in the corn maze, gone in the wind, and never aching to be placed back in his chest.

That's how it started.


End file.
